A hand-coloured image of Edvard Munch's Madonna has been sold in London for £1.25m, doubling its estimate and making it the most expensive print ever to be sold in the UK.

An estimate for the controversial artwork, in Munch's famous swirling style, had suggested the work would fetch £500,000 to £700,000 at the Bonhams prints sale in the capital.

The auctioneers said that as well as setting a UK record, the image was also the second most expensive print to be sold in the world.

The Madonna, bought today at Bonhams by a private American buyer, is dated 1895. It had not been shown in public before going to auction. Munch re-worked his original idea for the image – a Madonna in yellow and white, against a halo of blue, green and red – several times between 1895 and 1902.

His mistress, Dagny Juel, a "femme fatale", was the model; she was shot dead by a young lover in a Tblisi hotel at the age of 33, after numerous ill-fated affairs.

Robert Kennan, Bonhams' head of prints, said: "It has been a real privilege selling such a wonderful image. It fully deserves to have achieved such a fantastic price."

The work, described as being in excellent condition, had been in the same family for more than 100 years. It was sold on behalf of the estate of the British abstract expressionist artist Frank (Albert) Avray Wilson. Previously it had been in the collection of his wife, Ivy Eckbo, the adopted daughter of Eivind Eckbo, a Norwegian businessman and philanthropist who owned several Munch lithographs.

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